Russian Aid Negotiator Resigns,
With Bargaining Table Still Bare

Russia's top economic official quit his job in anger Friday, protesting President Boris Yeltsin's reappointment of a holdover from the previous government as finance minister.

Alexander Shokhin, the deputy prime minister who was put in charge of the country's tangled relations with Western creditors, said the minister, Mikhail Zadornov, might know finance, but "his professionalism has not been confirmed in the past month,"...